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Inferring causal effects of a treatment, intervention or policy from observational data is central to many applications. However, state-of-the-art methods for causal inference seldom consider the possibility that covariates have missing…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-26 Imke Mayer , Julie Josse , Félix Raimundo , Jean-Philippe Vert

The proximal causal inference framework enables the identification and estimation of causal effects in the presence of unmeasured confounding by leveraging two disjoint sets of observed strong proxies: negative control treatments and…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Antonio Olivas-Martinez , Peter B. Gilbert , Andrea Rotnitzky

The assumption that data samples are independent and identically distributed (iid) is standard in many areas of statistics and machine learning. Nevertheless, in some settings, such as social networks, infectious disease modeling, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-02-06 Eli Sherman , Ilya Shpitser

Unobserved confounding arises when an unmeasured feature influences both the treatment and the outcome, leading to biased causal effect estimates. This issue undermines observational studies in fields like economics, medicine, ecology or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Alexander Merkov , David Rohde , Alexandre Gilotte , Benjamin Heymann

Networks represent relationships between entities in many complex systems, spanning from online social interactions to biological cell development and brain connectivity. In many cases, relationships between entities are unambiguously…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2018-01-23 Ivan Brugere , Brian Gallagher , Tanya Y. Berger-Wolf

If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal inference can help inferring properties of the 'unobserved joint distributions'…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-05-18 Dominik Janzing

Methods that rely on proxies, without imposing strong parametric structure, are increasingly used to deal with unobserved variables in causal inference. One influential line of this work reconstructs latent distributions used to identify…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Helen Guo , Ilya Shpitser , Elizabeth L. Ogburn

Proxy variables are commonly used in causal inference when unmeasured confounding exists. While most existing proximal methods assume a unidirectional causal relationship between two primary variables, many social and biological systems…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-07-21 Jiaqi Min , Xueyue Zhang , Shanshan Luo

Causal effect estimation has been studied by many researchers when only observational data is available. Sound and complete algorithms have been developed for pointwise estimation of identifiable causal queries. For non-identifiable causal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-26 Ziwei Jiang , Lai Wei , Murat Kocaoglu

Learning causal relationships among a set of variables, as encoded by a directed acyclic graph, from observational data is complicated by the presence of unobserved confounders. Instrumental variables (IVs) are a popular remedy for this…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-04-17 Jing Zou , Wei Li , Wei Lin

Unmeasured confounding presents a common challenge in observational studies, potentially making standard causal parameters unidentifiable without additional assumptions. Given the increasing availability of diverse data sources, exploiting…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-09-18 Shanshan Luo , Yechi Zhang , Wei Li

If $X,Y,Z$ denote sets of random variables, two different data sources may contain samples from $P_{X,Y}$ and $P_{Y,Z}$, respectively. We argue that causal discovery can help inferring properties of the `unobserved joint distributions'…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-12 Dominik Janzing , Philipp M. Faller , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

We consider the estimation of average treatment effects in observational studies and propose a new framework of robust causal inference with unobserved confounders. Our approach is based on distributionally robust optimization and proceeds…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-02-06 Dimitris Bertsimas , Kosuke Imai , Michael Lingzhi Li

We consider inferring the causal effect of a treatment (intervention) on an outcome of interest in situations where there is potentially an unobserved confounder influencing both the treatment and the outcome. This is achievable by assuming…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-15 Ruolin Meng , Ming-Yu Chung , Dhanajit Brahma , Ricardo Henao , Lawrence Carin

In longitudinal studies where units are embedded in space or a social network, interference may arise, meaning that a unit's outcome can depend on treatment histories of others. The presence of interference poses significant challenges for…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-08-26 Ye Wang , Michael Jetsupphasuk

Estimating causal treatment effects in observational settings is frequently compromised by selection bias arising from unobserved confounders. While traditional econometric methods struggle when these confounders are orthogonal to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Ahmed Dawoud , Osama El-Shamy

Signed networks are frequently observed in real life with additional sign information associated with each edge, yet such information has been largely ignored in existing network models. This paper develops a unified embedding model for…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Haoran Zhang , Junhui Wang

Inferring causal structures from time series data is the central interest of many scientific inquiries. A major barrier to such inference is the problem of subsampling, i.e., the frequency of measurement is much lower than that of causal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Mingzhou Liu , Xinwei Sun , Lingjing Hu , Yizhou Wang

Traditionally, statistical and causal inference on human subjects rely on the assumption that individuals are independently affected by treatments or exposures. However, recently there has been increasing interest in settings, such as…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-02-25 Elizabeth L. Ogburn , Ilya Shpitser , Youjin Lee

Causal inference is capable of estimating the treatment effect (i.e., the causal effect of treatment on the outcome) to benefit the decision making in various domains. One fundamental challenge in this research is that the treatment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Qian Li , Zhichao Wang , Shaowu Liu , Gang Li , Guandong Xu